MANY MINDEDOne in eight US teaching posts is vacant or underqualified
The Hechinger Report published an opinion piece by Alan Mather on 3 August 2026 arguing that the United States has a real teacher shortage, and that the national argument over whether one exists has obscured where it actually falls.
The figure at its centre: an estimated 425,000 teaching positions are either vacant or filled by underqualified staff — roughly one in eight teaching positions nationally. Mather, a former Chicago assistant principal, describes posting a physics opening in the late 1990s and receiving 20 applications against 150 for English, and by the time he left the district being lucky to draw one or two qualified candidates for the same posting.
His argument against the aggregate view is specific. National supply measured against national demand looks roughly balanced, and recent layoffs appear to support that — but those layoffs are driven by enrolment decline, expiring pandemic relief funds and district budget cuts rather than a surplus of qualified teachers. A district can cut positions it cannot afford while still failing to hire special education teachers, bilingual educators or high school physics teachers. When a post cannot be filled, most districts lower the bar rather than leave a classroom empty, placing teachers on emergency or provisional permits in front of the students who need the most support. Those teachers are far more likely to leave, which feeds the cycle. Mather cites the Learning Policy Institute on that pattern, and notes that about 90% of teacher demand is driven by attrition, roughly two-thirds of it for reasons other than retirement.
Knowledge is the need where the free-at-the-point-of-use future arrived earliest and least evenly: the material is free, and the person who makes it land is not.
This is an opinion column. The 425,000 figure is cited rather than established by the piece, and the remedies it proposes — deliberate local recruitment, earlier classroom exposure — come from a handful of district programmes rather than a controlled comparison.
Source: Hechinger Report